Marc Emery Plans Anti-Conservative Tour After Prison Release

Pot activist Marc Emery, who will be released from a U.S. prison this summer, has announced a cross-Canada tour aimed at unseating the Conservative government in 2015.

Starting on Sept. 8, 2015, Emery plans to hold rallies in 30 Canadian cities leading up to the October federal election, he wrote on his blog this week.

"The intent will be to impress upon the Canadian cannabis culture to get out and vote – and vote against the currently-governing prohibitionist Conservative party," Emery wrote. He added that it's "essential" that the Liberals and leader Justin Trudeau, who favours legalizing cannabis, form the next government, "with input from the also laudable Green Party MPs and New Democratic Party MPs."

Last October, Emery's wife, Jodie Emery, went to Ottawa in a futile attempt to lobby the government to allow Marc to serve the rest of his sentence in Canada.

"People will listen to what he has to say because he was unfairly and unjustly sent to a foreign country for actions carried out in Canada, and Canadians are very upset about that. They have been ever since 2005 so we're coming up on a decade of outrage against the government of Canada and specifically the Conservatives for extraditing him in 2010," Jodie Emery told The Huffington Post B.C. on Monday.

Emery, nicknamed the Prince of Pot, is scheduled to be released early for good behaviour from the Yazoo City Prison in Mississippi on July 9, after serving 85 per cent of his sentence. He will be taken to an immigration facility in Louisiana where he will have to wait up to five weeks for paperwork to be processed. He is expected to arrive in Detroit/Windsor around August 15.

"The only success the police had in sending Marc down was stopping the money flow that came from the seeds to legalization groups in Canada and around the world," said Jodie Emery. "The loss of money was definitely felt but Marc's mission had been accomplished. People planted the seeds, they started businesses. They got politically active."

Marc Emery touched on his personal motivation to see a change of federal government: "The Conservatives, in the most crass, illegal and unjust manner possible, refused to follow through on the International Transfer of Offenders Act, a bi-lateral treaty that obligates the Canadian government repatriate me if I qualify (and I do) so I may serve my sentence in Canada."